Christine Sutherland is the CEO of The Lifeworks Group Pty Ltd, and the developer and founder of MDR Therapy for Chronic Pain

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Christine’s background is both corporate and clinical, and as well as her peer-reviewed and published research, her reference texts have been published by McGraw-Hill in Australia, Europe and the USA and translated into several languages, and also published in Arabic by Jarir.

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In the late ’80s, early ’90s, like many therapists around the world, Christine was very interested in what were then known as the “energy” therapies and indeed was one of the pioneers of EFT and other therapies in Australia.

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However it became clear to her that the theoretical basis of the “energy” therapies was not only completely spurious, but was deeply repellent to the medical sector because of its clearly unscientific, mystical principles, which in turn led to ineffective practice and therefore unreliable and unpredictable outcomes.

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Examination and analysis of actual affect mechanisms, together with deep investigation of verified scientific literature, enabled Christine to discount many “purple hat” processes and finally to describe a soundly scientific theoretical basis for the mechanism itself and for observed changes. The principles and methodologies described were given the name “MDR” to put forward the understanding that the stable of techniques under the MDR umbrella utilised multi-sensory input to disrupt (and thereby permanently extinguish) the reconsolidation of a conditioned response, very quickly, and also permanently. (MDR is an acronym for “Multi-sensory Disruption of Reconsolidation of conditioned responses.)

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Current scientific literature has begun to describe this disruption of “reconsolidation”, and emotions such as fear, anger, and anxiety are now much better understood. And so today’s research begins to follow the direction Christine pinpointed nearly 20 years ago.